The Mask of Atreus (17 page)

CHAPTER 29

Deborah had an early dinner and a glass of retsina in another Plaka bar, and then retired to her hotel room to read Leo Deuel's
Memoirs of Heinrich Schliemann
to see if she could discover anything else about the disappearance of Priam's Treasure. She pulled her knees under her and read with a pencil in one hand, underscoring parts which struck her as especially significant. The story as Deuel presented it was roughly as follows.

It was 1873. The Turkish government was threatening to revoke Schliemann's digging permit because they suspected (rightly, as it turned out) that he had already smuggled objects he had discovered in Troy out of the country. He seemed to be digging at random, moving from area to area and level to level apparently unaware that much of what he was turning up came from different periods. He was convinced that the lowest level of the city was the Troy of Homer's
Iliad,
an obsession which blinded him to his workmen's destruction of other levels of the settlement and even to their theft of some of their finds.

Schliemann's strange and controversial triumph came one morning in June, only days before the excavation was to close. He was, he claimed, walking around the excavations when he glimpsed the shine of metal at the base of a wall. He began digging at the piece by himself, quickly revealing a store of gold, vases and drinking vessels, diadems, jewelry, and other treasures. It was, he said, Priam's hoard, a cache the value of whose gold alone totaled over a million French francs. The treasure was, he said, the ultimate proof of the truth of Homer's description of Troy's riches. 139

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Questions were raised about his vague and contradictory account of where the hoard was found, but these quickly became irrelevant. With total disregard for his agreement with the Turks, for whom the hoard was a national treasure headed for the newly established Constantinople Museum, he immediately arranged to have them shipped to Athens, where he then lived. The goods were smuggled out in six baskets and a bag, their contents concealed even from his fellow excavators.

Seventeen years later, his Mycenaean excavations at a glorious end, Schliemann was once more digging in Troy. He found four priceless stone ax heads and repeated his earlier behavior, smuggling the artifacts out of Turkey and back to Greece, declaring them to customs officers to be Egyptian in order to facilitate their subsequent reexportation. He had no intention of leaving these treasures in Greece. They were earmarked for Berlin.
Berlin?

Deborah reread the relevant passage several times. Both caches, Priam's Treasure and the stone axes, were shipped to Germany where, on Schliemann's death in 1890, they were placed in a specially built wing of the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin, the archaeologist's dying gift to the nation of his birth. But that was not the end of their wanderings. Deuel's chapter closed with one last tantalizing piece of history. At the end of World War Two, the Russian army penetrated Berlin, and in that city's ignominious fall, Schliemann's Trojan hoards vanished, presumably taken by pillaging Russian troops. Whether the treasures were scattered, stolen, or merely destroyed, the book could not say. At the time of printing, their whereabouts were unknown and presumably lost forever.

Russian?

She closed the book, lay back, and stared at the ceiling fan, seeing the dead face of Sergei Voloshinov, a soldier of the Soviet Union . . .

Could Schliemann have done in Mycenae what he did 140

A. J. Hartley

twice in Troy, secretly exporting a store of undeclared findings more remarkable than those he reported? In Troy he had shown himself to be convinced of his own proprietary rights where his discoveries were concerned, and though he seemed less anxious to keep his discoveries out of Greek hands than he was out of Turkish hands (his attitudes to the "Oriental"

Turks were ethnocentric if not actually racist), it was surely possible that he would deem only Germany worthy of his ultimate prize. But if that was so, why was there no record of it in Berlin? Would he not have proudly displayed it with his other discoveries for German museumgoers?

But Schliemann had been largely derided by the German public, and he had felt that derision bitterly. He was, moreover, nothing if not eccentric. This man who had built himself a classical mansion only a few blocks from where Deborah now lay, who had named his servants after figures from mythology, and had insisted that all messages for him were delivered in classical Greek, this man was surely a law unto himself. If such a man had discovered and preserved what he fervently believed to be the body of Agamemnon himself in all the finery of his burial, what might he not do to keep it to himself? But if he
had
kept it secret, how had it found its way into a secret room in a small museum in Atlanta, Georgia, and what might link that secret trove to the dead Russian who had been skulking around the museum parking lot only days before?

The next morning, after a breakfast of cured ham, feta cheese, and crusty bread with yogurt and honey, Deborah found the young beauty at the check-in desk downstairs and asked if there was somewhere she could get online.

"There is a cyber cafe on the corner of Ermou and Voulis,"

she said, mechanically producing the hotel's trusty map and circling the intersection with a pen.

Deborah found the spot without difficulty, though it looked more like a bar, and an empty one at that. She went 141

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inside and looked around at the counter with its chrome stools, mirrored wall with advertisements for Mataxa brandy, and its silent pinball machine. She was considering leaving when a man's voice said,
"Neh?"

He was twenty-five or so and round-faced, which was the only part of him she could see, since he seemed to be sticking out of the floor. There was a staircase which came up behind the bar.

"Parakalo,"
she said,
"mipos milateh anglika?"

Do you speak English?
It was pretty much the only Greek phrase she knew. If he answered anything but
yes,
she was screwed.

"Yes," he said, smiling a little uncertainly.

"I was looking for a computer," she said.

His smiled fluctuated.

"Internet?" she ventured, her fingers involuntarily tapping at an imaginary keyboard.

The smile returned, laced this time with a hint of triumph.

"Down there," he said, walking down the stairs, amending the remark to "Down
here
" as he walked. At the foot of the stairs he gestured proudly to four computer terminals lined up on tables against the wall, each with its own chrome chair, pencil, and neat stack of notepaper. She beamed her thanks, and he pointed out the Web browser on the screen, then the rates which were posted on a chart by the wall. Two euros for the first half hour, one euro per half hour thereafter. A bargain.

"Coffee, you like?" he asked.

"Yes, please," she said.

"Nescafe," he added, screwing up his face a little apologetically. "OK?"

"OK."

He left, and she navigated to the Hotmail home page. It took her under five minutes to set up a new (and free) e-mail address under the ludicrous name Ancientambassador2@

hotmail.com, at least one of those minutes being taken up largely with her bewilderment that Ancientambassador1@

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hotmail.com was already taken. She checked Calvin's address from his card and typed: Calvin,

As promised, here is my new account. I don't imagine it can store much, so no pictures or other large files, please. Let me know all your news.

All is fun and frivolity here. Miss you.

D

That seemed sufficiently vague.

She wasn't sure why she had added that "Miss you" to the end, or whether it was supposed to make the message cryptically innocuous. But then she had added her initial, which would give the game away to anyone who read it anyway. Did she actually miss him? No, that was absurd. She didn't know him. She missed talking to someone who seemed to believe her, who seemed to be on her side, perhaps, but that was all.
And the fact that he is handsome and amiable and smart
means nothing . . . ?

Nothing at all, she decided half seriously. If there were any other whisperings in her brain it was the dull hysteria of her predicament talking, and such voices should be quickly silenced.

She checked her watch and found she still had twenty minutes of her half hour to go, and the coffee had not yet arrived. She pulled up the Google search engine and typed in

"Mycenae." The first link to come up took her directly to the Greek archaeological trust's official site. It gave some basic history, a few photographs, seasonal hours, and rates. She tried a different search, this time typing "Priam's Treasure"

and pulling up the first hit she found as the moonfaced proprietor returned with her coffee.

"Efharisto,"
she said. "Thank you."

"Paracalo,"
he replied, setting the mug down. It looked thin and milky, but appetizing for all that. "You are English?"

he said.

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"American," she said.

The word could generate a broad range of reactions outside the U.S., and she watched him guardedly, but there was no need.

"Ah," he said, delightedly. "Elvis Presley!"

"Right," she said, smiling as his open smile took another five years off him.

"Blue swathe shoes," he said.

"Right," she said again. "Blue suede shoes."

So long as he doesn't sing,
she thought. But he didn't, indeed his attention was turned to the computer, a frankly interested look on his face. Two euros apparently did not buy privacy.

"Priam," he said, nodding approvingly. He pronounced the first syllable as in "
pre
natal."

"Yes," she said.

"Pusskin," he said.

"I'm sorry?" she said, politely.

"Pusskin," he said again, reaching for a scrap of paper and scribbling the word with the stub of pencil as he said it.

"Museo Pusskin."

She frowned quizzically.

He leaned forward toward the keyboard.

"Please?" he said.

"Er . . . OK," she said, leaning out of the way as he tapped on the keyboard, clicked a link, and pulled up the official Web site of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. She watched dumbfounded as he clicked two more links and pulled up an image of a display case containing what was, quite unmistakably, the collection of artifacts Schliemann had called

"Priam's Treasure."

Deborah couldn't believe her eyes. The hoard recovered from Troy, smuggled out, and then vanished away was here in front of her on the screen, apparently sitting in a Moscow museum!

The text below stated in occasionally fractured English that the display contained the finds made by Heinrich Schliemann 144

A. J. Hartley

in Troy at the end of the nineteenth century, that they had been stored in the flak tower of the Berlin zoo until they had been "liberated" by Russian troops. For half a century the treasure was buried once again, this time in the Pushkin's vault, until the museum admitted their existence to the world in 1994 and put them on display, too late, apparently, to be detailed in any of Richard's books. Ownership of the treasure was disputed by Turkey, Greece, Germany, and other excavators. Legal disputes were ongoing . . .

"Very old," said the young man. "Very beautiful."

"Yes," said Deborah.

And if one batch of Schliemann's treasure could resurface after all these years, she thought, why not another? She resolved to call Marcus and arrange a meeting. CHAPTER 30

Deborah had suggested that they meet in a restaurant, Marcus had picked which one--Kostoyiannis, an upscale place on Zaimi right behind the archaeological museum. He had not needed to consult a map or a guidebook.

Deborah had arrived deliberately early, walked past the place a couple of times, watched it from a department store window across the street, and finally gone in with ten minutes to spare. She was jumpy, and the fact that the restaurant seemed to be patronized almost exclusively by local Greeks made her still more uneasy, as if the overheard snatches of tourist English which she had been accustomed to in the Plaka had provided a kind of safety net, a sense of the familiar. He arrived precisely on time, elegant in a pale gray suit. He spoke to the headwaiter in easy Greek before taking his seat. Deborah forced a smile.

"I'm glad you called," he said. "We have much to discuss."

On the phone she had told him that she still didn't trust him, still--in fact--suspected him of Richard's murder, but he had waved that aside, recognizing it for the bluster it was. In truth, she didn't know what to believe, but she thought this strange man's stranger tale of long-dead kings made rather more sense than she had wanted to admit. It was the only way she could make sense out of his obvious desire to talk to her.

"The
mezedhes
here are excellent," he said. She nodded as if she knew what that meant and studied the menu, which was in Greek. She crawled through the list, unpacking the letters as best she could and, coming up with only four items she recognized, felt defeated and a little defensive.

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"Would you like me to order for you?" he asked, reading her look.

"No, thank you," she said, wishing he would.

"You should try the rabbit stew," he suggested. "It's a house specialty."

She paused, considering a retort, then gave up.

"OK," she said. "Get that for me, then. And the . . ."

"Mezedhes?"

"Right," she said. "Some of those."

He ordered in Greek, selected a bottle of retsina that was less acrid with the tang of resin than most, then laid his pipe down on the table and looked at her.

"We've already said how little we trust each other, so perhaps we can shelve the posturing and er . . .
get right to it
, as you Americans say?"